


Whole

by gonergone



Category: Secret History - Donna Tartt
Genre: F/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 13:23:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2813501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gonergone/pseuds/gonergone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charles considers his relationship with Camilla.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Whole

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mistrali](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mistrali/gifts).



In his dreams, Bunny always ignored him. It was fitting, now that Charles wanted the confrontation, the recriminations and the anger, that all he got was cold silence and icy stares. They had _killed_ him; even in his dreams he never forgot that fact for a second, and he wanted Bunny to repay him for it. He begged for it, sometimes, but Bunny only shrugged past him, looked through him like he wasn't even there. Like he was nothing.

Charles dreamed about Bunny nearly every night, unless he was so drunk he passed out. In Texas they had a single mattress on the floor of the trailer, and in the afternoons before work Charles would lie on it, nursing a bottle of whiskey and watching the dusty sunlight move slowly across the floor. He spent a lot of time there, or sitting on the concrete steps outside the bar, wrapped in a battered old jacket with a bummed cigarette, the smoke curling up toward the stars as he wondered what his life would be like, could be like, if he were a completely different person.

He tried not to think about Camilla at all.

*

The Bacchanal – the real one, the only attempt that worked – was mostly a blur only a few days later. They were drunk by the time it started, drunk on top of empty stomachs and no sleep, drunk and exhausted and, Charles thought, they were all sick of it, of all of it, except for Henry; but they were doing it one last time anyway. 

They had started in their chitons, naked underneath. It was cold; Charles could feel the freezing wind even through his drunken haze, the yellowed autumn grass and stiff dead leaves sticking to the bottoms of his feet. There had been flurries the night before, and it was so cold that they all knew there probably wasn't going to be another week before the real snows came to the mountains.

So they had done it, a little uncertainly: holding each other down, stroking each other to orgasm. Except Charles couldn't watch Francis touch Camilla, even though Francis had his head turned away from her pale form, his hands awkward on her thighs. Even though he knew perfectly well, in his more lucid moments, that when Francis was touching her he was thinking of Charles.

Charles would never forget the way that Francis looked at him when he'd shoved him off of her. When he had taken his place. He'd stretched her wrists above her head and pressed them down into the mud, no longer playacting about it. He'd hurt her – the bruises on her wrists didn't fade for days – but he hadn't even noticed. The only thing he'd been able to think about had been claiming her, of making sure no one else could have her.

Then everything faded out. They never talked about it, afterward, and the one good thing about the dead farmer (which Charles would never had admitted out loud) was that it did tend to overshadow the rest of the night. Later – always later, always too late – he thought that maybe if things had ended differently, if there had been no farmer or the rites themselves hadn't worked, then maybe he finally would have had to discuss the other things with someone. Maybe that would have saved him, somehow. Because, and he was quite certain of this, even if the farmer hadn't been killed, even if Bunny hadn't… things would still have fallen apart. That he knew with certainty. There were plenty of mornings, even before, that he'd looked into the mirror and not been sure who he was seeing. 

When they had been little, he and Camilla had believed that they were two halves to a whole, and they had pretended to believe it even into adulthood. The truth, as he came to understand it on those long afternoons in the desert, was the Camilla had always been the strong one, the whole; he was nothing; a blown out candle. Charles knew it, and in his dreams Bunny knew it, too. 

Eventually, he would learn to live with it.


End file.
